Starting a Baking or Canning Business

Some of the largest food brands have their beginnings from their home kitchen. They would have started a small home based business from home. Whether it be baking some cookies or pies, or making jars of jellies or relishes, there is no limit to what you can cook up from your home to becoming a full-size business.

You may have ended up here for one of the following reasons.

It may be that you have a great recipe that many people say you should get into business at selling this stuff.

You may already have a product and have tried to sell it with a poor return on investment. Putting hours of work making your product then spending money and time at booths for various local events.

For whatever reason you’ve ended up here, we hope to be able to help you find a way to market your product in a manner that you have not thought of or maybe a little apprehensive due to lack of knowledge.

We have never attempted this type of business over all the years of experience working from home. We do have however much experience in selling different kinds of products over the years, and we know of people that do make a living in such a way and were able to provide some added insight on how they succeeded.

Where do you start?

As with all the other home business options we’ve listed on our website, you will also need to do some homework. You will need to check with your local health department, municipality and insurance companies to be sure that you can bake, can or prepare foods in your home for resale. Many regions do not allow for such businesses to run out of your home if you don have the proper zoning or meet minimal standards. Which is not a bad thing as I am sure you want to ensure that the food you are preparing is not going to make anybody sick.

Then hopefully, you do have a recipe that everyone raves about and is not available in any store. Uniqueness is what is going provide you with the edge to bump out the mega companies that pump out millions of food products daily.

ChillyChiles.com is a good example of someone local that started making hot sauces at home and now has the largest in-store and online selection of hot sauces in Canada.

So once you have found and can make your product efficiently at optimum quality, you are ready for marketing.

Look at me already jumping ahead…I forgot the all important “Business Plan.”

I know that sounds boring, but successful businesses all have one thing in common, yup that’s right, a business plan.

You need that foundation piece to either secure financing if needed and to ensure distributors and customers.

There is nothing more awkward than to arrive at a potential customer and not have a clear mission statement or projection of sales. Not to mention the need to know your cost of production, so you know how much you need to charge. Hopefully, the price is less or equivalent to your competition.

Now for the fun part.

You have your winning product and your business plan.

Your business plan will likely include how you will be marketing your product, but if you didn’t go to that direction yet because you just want to see if you want to go ahead with this option, then I will continue to explain some options.

The most famous and well-known method of selling home-made foods are at local farmers markets, bizarre or craft show events.

As mentioned earlier this option may take up much of your time, and the costs may add up to be more than it is worth. This is not to say that it can’t be profitable, but it will limit you to how much you can sell. I f you are just looking to supplement your income on a part-time basis and enjoy going to these type of venues then this may all you need to do. Keep in mind that you will always need one or two people stay at the booth the whole day. Then there is the full setting up and taking down all your inventory, bringing everything there and back home. The volume of sales will depend on the number of attendants and whether your product falls well into the theme of the event. As an example, a craft show may not be as profitable in sales compared to a farmers market. The consumer stage will be different for both of these events.You can read more on purchasing stages here.

Another option is to have your product on shelves in local corner stores or within local restaurants. This option will take a proper business plan to show that you are a valid business and have plans in place to answer or adjust to various scenarios. Redhenbaking.com is a perfect example of starting their business by baking and delivering bread to local stores and restaurants. Then there are people like Verne and Judy Duclos at Gizmospickledplus.com that farm most of the raw ingredients or harvest from the wild which is a perfect example of a product that no major companies can compete. My preferred story is about a guy in college making his own Almond and Butter because he was a vegetarian. He would put his jars of butter in the refrigerator and because he had roommates he would label his jarred butter with his name. That was the beginning of his product label called Justin’s.

Best way to leverage your business

Whichever option or direction you decide to take for selling your products, your business plan should include an online component. The perfect example to explain why you need a website are the links to successful businesses I added to this blog.

Having a proper website that people can access will only help your business grow faster to a broader audience. Not only will the site allow for locals to spread the word. You could create business cards and hand out during your local event sales to entice people to contact you or visit your site if they liked your product.

Choosing a proper name is key to ensuring customers can remember your website should they lose your card. I wrote a blog on choosing a website domain name to help you figure out the best name to use. Then customers can share your site on social media, and the word gets around, before you know it you may end up with thousands of customers. Remember there are billions online daily, you only need a small percentage of that to have a successful business.

Ok, but How do I Build My Website?

I know, not everybody knows how to build a website. Luckily there are some options that I have screened to make that part easy.

The service that offers you the cheapest option with easy step by step teaching and loads of support is available at my My #1 Recommended site. You can try it out for free to see if it is right for you. The best thing by going this route is that it does not limit you to just one site or one product. With the knowledge you gain there is no limit to what you can accomplish.

Another option is to go with an all-in-one packaged ready-made type of store service. Shopify is probably one of the best online store service available. It can also be expanded, linked to your mobile or stationary store.

If you have any questions we would love to hear from you, put them down in the box at the bottom of this page.

11 comments on “Starting a Baking or Canning Business”

Hey, you have a interesting niche. I would love to start a home based business at my own house. The flexibility, no rental space and the convenience. You can also have your family members to help out if needed. You are right to mention that all businesses should have a business plan. In fact, this is the pillar to your success. Wish you all the best!

There are certainly many advantages to starting a home based business, except sometimes there are regulations that restrict what you can do from home. It is important to review those restrictions, thus the purpose of a business plan to cover all these situations. One of the reasons I went with using My #1 Recommended site is that there is no limits to where you can run this type of business.

I’ve always loved cooking and baking in general, and it’s awesome to hear that Wealthy Affiliate can be used to leverage those skills as well. I’ve personally been a member of WA for about 4 months now, and have my own content/niche website setup. It’s been a blast so far, and I might just have to start another website so I can actually sell some of my own products!

Thanks for this awesome guide and overview, very helpful and informative!

Thank you for reading my overview. I do plan to write posts with more detail for each of the work from home businesses listed. These first thoughts is in hopes to spark some creativity and passion for those interested in starting their own work from home business. These days it is important to have a website to leverage your business and there is no better way to learn everything there is to know about having a website than Wealthy Affiliate.

This is an awesome idea for a business! Anyone with a flair for this kind of thing would be perfect in this niche. I don’t think I would personally choose the baking or canning niche for my business, but I have friends who are into their baking. I will show this this post, they would definitely be interested in the idea of working from home.

Thank you so much for your interest in checking out some of my various posts!

I tell ya…I wish I had something like 72 hrs in a day so that I can pursue more of the ideas I write about on this site. seeing so many people becoming successful and happy in different home based niches make me want to do them all. My wife and I have done many of the business listed on this site from home over the years but a baking and canning business we have never endeavoured to try…yet!

Right now I’m content in creating and managing this site and my pbgiftideas.com site for now. Which brings me to the successful story about Justin’s Peanut Butter that I wrote about on my other site. His story falls well in with the start small and then grow into a global business type of success story.

Hi Paul and Brenda!
I am happy to have visited your site. You have a great site here informing visitors of various ways they can create their part time or even full time work at home job. You have a revealed a variety of ways that I was not thinking of. For example baking, offering services to companies and not only that but also how to go about doing it ensuring we follow rules of government bodies.
I must also say your site along with others have a wealth of information. Its very clean and clear with little or no distractions. Your points come across clearly so visitors will understand. It is organised too with media to back up clarify whatever you put out.
Thank you

I am happy to have visited your site. You have a great site informing visitors on how to create a part-time or full-time business at home. You have revealed a variety of ways I wasn’t even thinking about such as the content of this post explaining how to start a baking business or even cooking and offering services to companies. I love that you have outlined ways to ensuring that we follow the rules of various governing bodies.

I really like your site itself, it is very clean and the informative and I will keep coming back.

We appreciate your comment and feedback about my website on how to start a work from home business or find work from home jobs. We thrive to try and help people find the best way for them to make a living from home. As we mention on our front and about page we have done many of the businesses and jobs listed on our site. Other topics are based on information provided to us by friends, neighbors or colleagues that had experience in those fields.

One thing we learned is that any business you start today needs an online presence. We are lucky to have finally found the place to host and teach us everything we need to know to be successful online. I(Paul) wrote about my search for this platform in a blog called “How to Earn Extra Money Online”.

Hello
Thank you for visiting
This is only one of many ways to make a living from your home. If you were interested in this type of business, then you may also be interested in my blog about how to start a small farm business from home. One thing is for sure, no matter what type of business you start, marketing plays a key role in selling your products and there is no better way than creating and knowing how to bring traffic to your website. Wealthy Affiliate is one of the best non-advertised web hosting sites out there. Feel free to sign up for free and take it for a spin!

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Hello from Paul and Brenda

Combined, we have over 14 years of experience working in home based jobs and businesses. Our site will provide you with many work-from-home options. You will learn what is needed to start a home-based job or business, including how to build a website like this one.

We learned everything we needed to know about starting an online business by following the courses at Wealthy Affiliate